Return To The Crystal Temple Of The The Lost Vault of Kor-Avul-Thaa

By which I mean it is once again time to look through the Ancient Portable Hard-Drive Of Mystery!

These images represent some of my first experiments with GIMP, even more so than my previous archive post. The first two pictures are entries into old 2000ad Forum Art Competitions. To give you an idea of how old they are, this was back in the day when the 2000ad Forum was just a white screen with a blue margin and a big long list of threads arranged in order of recent additional posts. Which, if you don't know the 2000ad Forum, is probably more recently than you are thinking.

This one was for the prompt Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun! 

Next up we have Mega-City 1. Those few words do not fully convey the difficulty one would face in approaching such a topic. The world of Judge Dredd has had some spectacular artists work on it in the past, and trying to even come close to emulating their work only made me appreciate it more.

As a warning before clicking, this image is a little on the big side.

This final one is not from an art comp. In fact, I'm not even going to try and elaborate on this one; if you know, you know, and if not then it is a little bit difficult to explain...

A Sketch

A few week ago I mentioned the Weekly Themed Art Blog, which is providing a regular incentive to actually get something out there for the world to see.

The second brief was Diesel Punk Ladies And Their Machines. Over on the TAB you can see my original sketch, but today I have got round to adding some colour to the piece. This serves to demonstrate why I usually work in black and white.

Following this came the prompt of Tron, but I'll wait until my image goes up on the blog before I post it here. Everyone is currently working on Video Game Icons, and I think I'm going to enjoy doing that one a lot.

So why not pop along to the TAB and see what everyone's up to?

Doodles!

I promised more content, and so here it is:

This comic was an attempt to homage Kate Beaton's brilliant work. How much that actually comes across is perhaps debatable, so I thought I would spell it out here just to be sure.

Whenever I do Transformers pictures, I always get the feeling that the joke has probably been done a thousand times before. Yet I draw them anyway, because Transformers are so fun to draw! It was not until I had finished this picture that I realised that Optimus had found a shop that sells some damned big groceries. Feel free to assume that either he had found some planet full of giant, G1 weirdness, or else he had a moment of strange shifting proportions, like that episode where Soundwave tripped over a tree root.

In other news, here is some recently revealed work by Christov and Lee Bates. I am drawing your attention to this not only because it deserves to be seen, but also because Lee is working on a strip with me, the afore mentioned one about pirates. This is an event that fills me with much excitement.

I'm Back!

Phew, February was a bit dead here wasn't it? Some (one) readers of this blog that I know in the "Real World" have expressed admonishment over my recent lack of posts. This has largely come about because I have been working exclusively on Van Dom's super-duper secret project, and am as such unable to reveal the rightly guarded mysteries of Vandemonium . I did find some other stuff in those archives I have mentioned, but filling my blog with embarrassing relics didn't seem like a wise thing to do without newer work to go alongside it.

Then lo! A solution came from that lovecraftian chaos realm that is... The Web! Over on the 2000ad forum, Chris Askham presented the idea of an Art Blog. Such a concept will be familiar to all those who have studied the "Pass-Around-Mobiliary-Art" discovered beneath the previously hidden city of Commoriom; but for those who have not kept up to date with recent developments in Pseudo-Crypto-Paleo-Hyperborean-Art-History, I shall provide a brief summary.

The idea is that an eclectic assortment of adventurers from every walk of life would once a week take time out from their dazzling heists, quests for vengeance, Antarctic expeditions and the like, to bring into one place a small sketch that celebrates the nature of a theme chosen at random by one of their merry band.

Thus was born The Weely Themed Art Blog, or the Weekly TAB for short. The first theme chosen was Exorcism, and following the link will take you to a great many interpretations of that single word, revelling in the flexibility of language and the diversity of human vision.

 
Here is my effort. In case it isn't clear, it's Nemesis dragging the ghost of Torquemada, by the nose, out of a possessed Terminator. I was originally going to do something involving Solomon Kane, having recently been reading The Castle of the Devil which is brilliant. Then my Wonderful Ladyfriend suggested this idea instead, which I instantly went for because I love drawing Nemesis. 

With the Weekly TAB being... er... weekly, I should be able to get a half decent sketch on this blog every seven days. Then I just need to throw up some other work occasionally, and this blog will once again have content. Huzzar, content!